It’s quite interesting if you think about it sociologically. The faculty of today are the students of a few years ago, but the shift in institutional role completely changed their attitudes. So the students were outraged and the faculty thought it was fine.
Incidentally, there are worse cases than this not involving the universities, but the press won’t report on them. Reagan and Bush were practically in love with Saddam Hussein—after the US basically won the war for Iraq in the Iraq-Iran War, Bush wanted to increase aid to Iraq over a lot of objections from the Treasury Department and others, mostly on economic grounds, but he wanted it. In fact, in 1989 Bush invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the United States for advanced training in nuclear weapons production.[16] Then, in 1990, he sent a high-level senatorial delegation to Iraq led by Bob Dole (later a presidential candidate), with Alan Simpson and other big shots, and their mission was to convey Bush’s greetings to his friend Saddam and also to inform him that he should disregard criticisms that he hears in the American press. They promised Saddam that they would remove someone from the Voice of America who was being critical of Saddam. This was long after all of his worst atrocities—the Anfal massacre, the Halabja massacre—which the Reagan administration tried to cover up, said they were done by the Iranians, not by Saddam. All of that has been deep-sixed. You can find it in congressional hearings, but nobody will report it or comment on it.[17] That’s even worse than what was happening with Iran under the shah. The record is not a very pretty one if you look at it, and it certainly is not one of trying to reduce proliferation.
How can we be sure that any government is going to remain stable? For example, when the Iranian students came, the shah was in power, nobody knew that the Islamic uprising was coming—
They don’t care whether it’s Islamic or not. Take, say, Pakistan, in the 1980s: Pakistan was under the rule of a dictator, the worst of their many dictators, Zia-ul-Haq, who was also pushing a radical Islamist agenda and was receiving extensive funding from Saudi Arabia. They were trying to Islamize society, that’s when they were starting to set up these madrassas all over where the kids just study the Koran and radical Islam and so on. Saudi Arabia is the center of radical Islam, the most extreme fundamentalist state anywhere, and Reagan was supporting it.[18] They don’t care about radical Islam.
Like al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, bin Laden before—
The US supported them. And in fact, they explained why. It had nothing to do with liberating Afghanistan. The head of the CIA mission in Islamabad, that’s where the planning was going on, was frank about it. Basically he said, “We don’t have any interest in liberating Afghanistan, what we want to do is kill Russians.” And this is their chance. Brzezinski, to paraphrase, said things like, “This is great, it’s paying the Russians back for Vietnam.”[19] What were the Russians doing in Vietnam? Well, they were providing some limited support for resistance to US aggression, but that’s a crime, so we’ve got to pay them back by killing Russians and if a million Afghans die, it’s their problem.
Do you think it ever occurred to planners that al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, might come up with their own agenda?
Probably not. You can say the same about Hamas. Israel supported Hamas in the early days because they were a weapon against the secular PLO.[20] The US and Israel have quite consistently supported radical Islamic stands and it goes way back. Back in the early ’60s—in fact, the ’50s and the ’60s—there was a major conflict in the Arab world between Nasser, who was the symbol of secular nationalism, and Saudi rulers, who were the guardians of extremist, radical Islam. Who did the US support? The Saudis, of course. They were afraid of secular nationalism.
The British too. There’s a book by a British diplomatic historian—which will probably barely get reviewed in England—which is about Britain’s support of radical Islam, and it was quite extreme.[21] Same reasons, secular nationalism is much more dangerous. Sometimes you catch a tiger by the tail and don’t expect it. This is pretty much the same with Hezbollah. They developed in reaction to the US-backed Israeli invasion and occupation. That’s the way the world works.
Sometimes it’s called blowback. There are some analysts who argue that this is a self-defeating policy. But I’m not so convinced. I mean, the big mistake is supposed to have been installing the shah and overturning the parliamentary system, but it’s hard to see where that was a mistake. For twenty-five years it kept Iran completely under control, kept the US in control over the energy system. Planning doesn’t go much beyond that. If things work for twenty-five years, that’s a success.
The Tehran Research Reactor requires highly enriched uranium fuel to operate; the same is true for MIT’s reactor. The Department of Energy has told MIT it must convert to low-enriched fuel, but the head of engineering at the reactor said they’re most likely not going to meet the deadline.[22]
I don’t know anything about this.
It’s contentious on two points. One, there’s a reactor in a densely populated urban area. And two—
It’s what they’re using as fuel. So, you can do things with the high-energy fuel that you can’t do with less enriched fuel?
According to a Boston Globe story from 2009, the “MIT reactor could be converted quickly if it were willing to give up some performance.” The same report states the reactor “brings in about $1.5 million a year from commercial work, which covers about 60 percent of the annual operating costs.”[23]
Where do they get that from?
I’m unsure of the specific entities, but mainly from producing radiotherapies.[24]
There hasn’t been an inquiry at MIT into research, as far as I’m aware, since 1969. At that time, under the pressure of the student movement, there was a faculty/student inquiry. Actually I was on the committee, the Pounds Commission, which looked into MIT’s finances and also into war-related activities on campus. It was pretty interesting. It turned out that nobody, even the administration, knew the financial details. It turned out that roughly half of the institute budget was running two classified military laboratories: Lincoln, and what’s now the Draper Lab. The other half of the budget, I think, was approximately 90 percent funded by the Pentagon in those days.
The Pentagon, contrary to what people believe, is the greatest funder there is. They don’t pay all that much attention to what you’re doing; they just know that they’re the way to funnel taxpayer money into the next stage of the economy. We did look into military work. It turns out there was no classified work on campus and no direct military-related work, but anything that’s done is likely to have some military application. The only department that had any war-related work was the Political Science Department and it was being done under the rubric of a Peace Research Institute—straight out of Orwell—which had villas in Saigon where they were sending students for PhDs on counterinsurgency. And they were also running secret seminars in the Political Science Department on Vietnam strategy and so on. I found out when I was invited to take part in one.
16
See Gary Milhollin’s testimony, “U.S. Export Control Policy toward Iraq,” C-SPAN Video Library (C-SpanVideo.org), October 27, 1992. On Iraqi scientists invited by the DOE to attend a symposium on detonation physics, see Martin Hill, “Made in the USA: How We Sold Secrets to Iraq That Helped Saddam Hussein Go Nuclear,”
17
As early as 1983, US officials knew about Iraq’s “almost daily use” of chemical weapons against the Kurds and Iranians. National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 82, s.v. “Document 25.” In 1990, almost a year after Reagan left office, the US Marine Corps released a manual reiterating Iran, not Iraq, had employed chemical weapons: “Blood agents were allegedly responsible for the most infamous use of chemicals in the war—the killing of Kurds at Halabjah. Since the Iraqis have no history of using these two agents—and the Iranians do—we conclude that the Iranians perpetrated this attack. It is also worth noting that lethal concentrations of cyanogen are difficult to obtain over an area target, thus the reports of 5,000 Kurds dead in Halabjah are suspect.” Marine Corps Publications Electronic Library, s.v. “FMFRP 3-203,” December 1990, 100. In 2002 Pres. Bush reversed position: “The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens, leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children…. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.” George W. Bush, State of the Union Address (January 29, 2002).
18
The Reagan-Zia alliance began when the US and its European and Arab allies sought to arm the mujahideen’s “jihad against the Soviet Union” in Afghanistan. The CIA, in partnership with Pakistani and Saudi intelligence agencies, funded the arming and training of an estimated thirty-five thousand Islamic militants from forty-three Muslim countries in Pakistani madrassas between 1982 and 1990. In return, Reagan agreed not to question Zia’s policies: torture, drug trafficking by the army, and Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. According to journalist Ahmed Rashid, “This global jihad launched by Zia and Reagan was to sow the seeds of al Qaeda and turn Pakistan into the world center of jihadism for the next two decades…. Reagan was to severely compromise the U.S. stance on nuclear proliferation by declining to question Islamabad’s development of nuclear weapons—as long as Zia did not embarrass Washington by testing them.”
19
According to CIA station chief in Pakistan in 1981, Howard Hart, his orders were to “Go kill Soviet soldiers.” Hart responded, “Imagine! I loved it.” Tim Weiner,
20
Andrew Higgins, “How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas,”
21
Mark Curtis,
22
Reactor fuel that is less than 20 percent 235U is classified as LEU or “non-weapon-useable low-enriched uranium.” Fuel that is greater than 20 percent 235U is classified as HEU or high-enriched uranium—“usually weapon-grade uranium (WgU) containing 90 percent or more 235U.” Frank von Hippel, “A Comprehensive Approach to Elimination of Highly-Enriched-Uranium from All Nuclear-Reactor Fuel Cycles,”
23
Bryan Bender, “Potent Fuel at MIT Reactor Makes for Uneasy Politics,”
24
Ibid. In addition to training nuclear engineers, the MIT Reactor “is also a money-making enterprise, by radiating seeds used in prostate cancer treatments and by turning silicon into high-performance semiconductors for the hybrid car market.”